The difference between an AI that gives you generic output and one that gives you output that fits your business is almost entirely down to context.
The model doesn't know who your customers are, what your prices are, what your voice sounds like, who's in your team, or what makes your business different. Until you tell it. And most people never do, they start every conversation from scratch, and then they wonder why the output is generic.
This module is about the three habits and tools that change that.
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The Business Brief: 15 Lines That Change Everything
The single highest-impact thing you can do to improve every AI conversation you have is to write a business brief and paste it at the start of every relevant conversation.
A business brief is a short paragraph or list that gives the AI the context it needs to produce relevant output. It takes about 20 minutes to write once and then you have it forever.
Here's what to include:
Business name: [Your business name]
What we do: [One clear sentence]
Location: [City, state, and if relevant, service area]
Customers: [Who they are, demographics, common questions, how they find you]
Voice: [How you speak, professional? casual? direct? warm? technical?]
Prices: [Approximate ranges for your main services, or "mid-market"]
Team: [How many staff, any relevant structure]
What we're proud of: [One or two things that make you different]
What we don't do: [Services or customer types you turn away]
Banned words/phrases: [Words that don't fit your brand voice]
Current focus: [What problem you're trying to solve right now]Here's an anonymised example of what this looks like in practice:
Business: Meridian Electrical (residential and commercial electrician,
South East Melbourne)
What we do: Electrical installations, switchboard upgrades, data cabling,
solar connection. Residential focus, some small commercial.
Customers: Homeowners aged 30-65 in Melbourne's south-east. Often renovating
or dealing with an old house. Main concerns: price, licensing, and reliability.
Voice: Direct and professional. Not corporate. Like a tradie who knows their
stuff and explains it clearly without jargon.
Prices: Call-out $120 + work. Switchboard upgrade $1,800-$3,500.
Team: 6 electricians, 1 admin. I (the owner) do all client comms.
Proud of: Never missed a scheduled job in four years. Fully licensed.
Don't do: EV charger installs (we refer those out), large commercial.
Banned words/phrases: "seamless," "premium," "world-class," "passionate."
Current focus: Getting better Google reviews and reducing quote follow-up time.With this pasted at the top of any AI conversation, the output stops being generic. ChatGPT won't suggest services you don't offer. It won't use words that don't fit your voice. It knows you're in Melbourne, not Melbourne Florida.
Write your brief this week. Keep it in a notes app, Google Doc, or text file. Paste it whenever you open a new AI conversation for business work.
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The Prompt Library: Your Reusable Asset
The second highest-impact tool is a prompt library: a document where you save the prompts that worked well.
Most business owners re-invent the wheel every time they sit down with an AI. They start from scratch, write something similar to what worked last time, get a similar result, and never save it. Six months later they can't remember how they got that great email draft.
A prompt library solves this. It's not complicated. It can live in a Google Doc, an Apple Note, or a text file. The structure is simple:
[Name of task], [Date created] [The prompt text, ready to paste] [Notes: what it's good for, any variations that work, any gotchas]
You will build this naturally over time if you simply add prompts that worked. After two months of moderate use, you'll have 15 to 20 reusable prompts that cover most of your common AI tasks.
The prompts that are worth saving: anything you'll use more than twice. Review responses. Quote follow-up emails. Job ad templates. FAQ update prompts. Supplier brief templates. Meeting summary structures.
The prompts that aren't worth saving: one-off tasks that are too specific to reuse.
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Memory Features and Saved Instructions
The major AI models have built-in ways to store context about you so you don't have to paste your brief every time. These features are genuinely useful once you understand them.
ChatGPT Memory: On ChatGPT, there's a Memory feature (under Settings) where you can instruct ChatGPT to remember things about you and your business. You can say: "Remember: I run a landscaping business in Brisbane. Always keep responses under 150 words unless I say otherwise. My business voice is direct and practical." ChatGPT will carry this into future conversations.
You can also tell ChatGPT to forget specific things, or clear all memory, if your context changes.
Claude Projects: Claude's Projects feature lets you create a persistent context for a specific business or topic. You set a "project brief" that Claude reads at the start of every conversation in that project. You can include your business brief, tone guidelines, banned words, and any ongoing context. Every conversation in the project starts with that context already loaded.
This is excellent for situations where you're doing ongoing work in Claude, reviewing contracts, drafting client communications, building SOPs. The context is always there.
Gemini Gems: Gemini has a similar feature called "Gems", customised AI assistants with pre-set instructions. You can create a "Business Writing" Gem with your voice and context pre-loaded, and open it whenever you need content written in your voice.
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The "House Rules" Pattern
Beyond the business brief, there's a simpler and faster way to inject context for a single session: a "house rules" block at the top of your prompt.
This is useful when you're doing something slightly outside the business brief, or when you need to add specific constraints to one conversation.
Real example:
House rules for this conversation:
- I'm writing to tradespeople, not homeowners
- Max 80 words per response unless I ask for more
- No bullet lists, use short paragraphs
- Australian English spelling
- Never suggest we offer services I haven't mentioned
[Your actual request here]Three to five house rules at the top of a conversation takes 60 seconds and noticeably changes the output.
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What Doesn't Work
Expecting the model to infer your context from one vague statement. "Write this in my style" without providing examples will produce the model's generic version of your industry's writing style. Give it examples, not instructions.
Relying entirely on memory features without checking them. ChatGPT memory and Claude Projects are helpful, but they're not infallible. If you change something about your business (new prices, new services, new brand voice), you need to update the memory. And sometimes memory retrieval is inconsistent. For critical tasks, paste the brief manually rather than trusting the model to remember it correctly.
Writing the brief once and never updating it. Your business changes. Your voice changes. Your prices change. If your brief is 18 months old and your hourly rate has gone up 20%, you'll get prompts that suggest the wrong pricing. Review your brief quarterly and update it.
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